► Today is Friday, Oct. 23, the 296th day of 2009. There are 69 days left in the year.
► Today’s birthdays: Baseball Hall of Famer Senator Jim Bunning (R-Ky.) is 78. Movie director Philip Kaufman is 73. Soccer great Pele is 69. Rhythm & blues singer Barbara Ann Hawkins (The Dixie Cups) is 66. Movie director Ang Lee is 55. Jazz singer Dianne Reeves is 53. Country singer Dwight Yoakam is 53. Community activist Martin Luther King III is 52. Movie director Sam Raimi is 50. Parodist “Weird Al’’ Yankovic is 50. Rock musician Robert Trujillo (Metallica) is 45. CNN medical reporter Dr. Sanjay Gupta is 40. Country singer Jimmy Wayne is 37. Actor Ryan Reynolds is 33. Actress Briana Evigan is 23. Actress Jessica Stroup is 23.
► In 1915, tens of thousands of women marched in New York City, demanding the right to vote.
► In 1942, during World War II, Britain launched a major offensive against Axis forces at El Alamein in Egypt.
► In 1946, the United Nations General Assembly convened in New York for the first time, at an auditorium in Flushing Meadow.
► In 1956, a student-sparked revolt against Hungary’s Communist rule began; as the revolution spread, Soviet forces started entering the country, and the uprising was put down within weeks.
► In 1973, President Richard Nixon agreed to turn over White House tape recordings subpoenaed by the Watergate special prosecutor to Judge John J. Sirica.
► In 1983, 241 US service members, most of them Marines, were killed in a suicide truck-bombing at Beirut International Airport in Lebanon.
► In 1987, the US Senate rejected, 58-42, the Supreme Court nomination of Robert H. Bork.
► In 1989, in a case that inflamed racial tensions in Boston, Charles Stuart claimed he and his pregnant wife, Carol, had been shot in their car by a black robber. (Carol Stuart and her prematurely delivered baby died; Charles Stuart later died, an apparent suicide, after he was implicated.)
► In 1995, a jury in Houston convicted Yolanda Saldivar of murdering Tejano singing star Selena. (Saldivar is serving a life prison sentence.)
► In 1999, 16 members of the Ku Klux Klan held a silent rally in New York City as thousands of counter-demonstrators jeered them.
► In 2004, gunmen ambushed a group of US-trained Iraqi soldiers on a road east of Baghdad; around 50 of the soldiers, who were unarmed, were killed execution-style. The Red Sox took Game 1 of the World Series, defeating the St. Louis Cardinals 11-9. Singer Ashlee Simpson was caught lip-synching during an appearance on NBC’s “Saturday Night Live.’’ Opera singer Robert Merrill died in New Rochelle, N.Y., at 87.
► In 2008, badgered by lawmakers on the House Oversight Committee, former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan denied the nation’s economic crisis was his fault but conceded the meltdown had revealed a flaw in a lifetime of economic thinking and left him in a “state of shocked disbelief.’’
